Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha has consistently combined the cityscape of his adopted hometown with vernacular language to communicate a particular urban experience. Encompassing painting, drawing, photography, and artist’s books, Ruscha’s work holds the mirror up to the banality of urban life and gives order to the barrage of mass media-fed images and information that confronts us daily. Ruscha’s early career as a graphic artist continues to strongly influence his aesthetic and thematic approach.

Born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska, Edward Ruscha was raised in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, where his family moved in 1941. In 1956 he moved to Los Angeles to attend the Chouinard Art Institute, and had his first solo exhibition in 1963 at the Ferus Gallery. In 1973, Ruscha began showing his work with Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Ruscha has represented the United States three times at the Venice Biennale in 1970, 1973 and 2005. Major solo exhibitions of Ruscha’s work have been held at the Hayward Gallery in London, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Ruscha is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Tate Modern in London and the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.